One of the significant problems in the underground implantation of utility elements, such as telephone lines and electric power lines, is the accurate and reliable marking of the location of these elements to prevent damage to the element by others disturbing the ground in the area and even damage in some cases caused by the utilities' own employess digging too close to the underground elements. This problem is magnified where the buried utility is fragile, such as in underground fiber optic telephone transmission lines.
The comon practice today is that before disturbing the ground in an area suspected to contain underground utilities, the contractor contacts the subject utility and someone from that utility responds by coming out to the area and temporarily marking the location of its buried elements with paint usually from a commmon paint spray can or temporary stakes and pennants. This procedure has many disadvantages, one being that it is costly for the utility to employ marker people for this purpose because such marking requests are very frequent. Furthermore, it is not always possible for the marking person to accurately mark the location of the buried element either because of his or her own errors or due to errors in the location drawing that he has used as a guide.
For these reasons it has for many years been desirable to design a utility marking system that is permanent, rather than temporary, since this permits accurate marking of the location of underground elements if the marker is installed at the time of original utility element ground implantation because its correct location is easily physically ascertainable then without resort to any locating maps. However, because these so-called "permanent" markers are subject to theft, vandalism and damage resulting from ground moving equipment, they have not proved permanent at all and, therefore, have not been used extensively by the utility companies.
It is a primary object of the present invention to provide a marker assembly that will ameliorate the problems noted above in marking underground utilities.